Rapid Fire Nov. 30, 2012: US Senate Gets Closer to NDAA

Desk Iron Dome. Make it happen.Ash is going to be SO jealous! If you throw pens at Leon Panetta’s desk, the small Iron Dome replica he received as a gift from Israeli Minister of Defense Ehud Barak won’t shoot to intercept. Panetta hid his disappointment gracefully but he would not say whether the anti-rocket system (marketed at full size by Raytheon in the US) would end up on the FY14 budget request. Joint press conference transcript. The US Senate has worked its way through a number of amendments to the FY13 NDAA, with hopes to wrap it up by tomorrow. Detainee matters continue to put Congress at odds with the Administration, which threatened to veto [PDF] the bill. Other familiar grounds for a fight include whether to continue funding MEADS, as well as the Navy’s insistence for the right to overspend on biofuels, just as the country is seeing domestic oil production reach levels not seen in two decades. President Obama signed secret Policy Directive 20 last month to define how to deal with cyber-attacks. The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the NSA that the agency (in consultation with the National […]